Extravagant Bodies: Crime and Punishment

Extravagant bodies is an international trans-disciplinary art festival initiated in 2007 as a triennial project that deals with societal demarcations of normal and pathological physicality, appearance, behaviour, sexuality and/or life style. Fourth edition of Extravagant bodies subtitled Crime and Punishment takes as its topic the social, legislative, scientific and ideological constructions of criminality and social norms that delineate criminal from non-criminal behaviour. The project views crime as indexical of all the cracks of repression hence criminals are the people who — by their own choice or by social and economical circumstance — have stepped beyond the boundaries of the existing system.

Compared to its previous editions, Extravagant bodies - Crime and Punishment is on the one hand shifting the focus from corporeal and psychological inscriptions of otherness to a broader view on socially proscribed morality and acceptable vs. non-acceptable lifestyles. Once again the key question remains: what is outside the norm? How are the boundaries between the criminalised and the non-criminalised regulated and safeguarded? Does law equal justice, or is there also violence and injustice produced in the name of law? What are the ideological presuppositions behind the social and legal regulations of criminality? Are there socially desired crimes, and to whose benefit are their committed?

What in the cases of criminal privatisation of public properties and expulsion of the poor, abuse of commons and occupation is happening on everyday level? Are the laws enough to protect public interest? What about the increasing radicalisation of the ideological opposition between the liberal, democratic and secular concept of the law, and the law grounded in religion, which does not merely concern the Islamic states of the Middle East? What about Western democratic societies whose liberal legislations are constantly challenged by pressures of religious (mostly Christian) groups? Key issues here still pertain to the body and sexuality: abortion, sex work, homosexuality...The final set of questions is linked to the new developments in science and technology. From recent scientific attempts to find neurological grounding of criminality, to the bio-ethical issues of the cloning of humans, and the stealing of identities. The question of how society deals with information that gets free will also be examined as one of the key questions of the post-Snowden era.

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